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He hiked out to the Donner cabins on the slightest pretext, content to sit among the ruined foundations and tree stumps while imagining that horrific winter decades before.He collected splinters of wood from Donner Party cabin logs, which he later encased in vials and sold for a dollar each to fund his Donner monument. When McGlashan was absent from the meals that Nona prepared for their family, “his empty plate enlarged before her eyes until it filled the whole table,” one of their daughters wrote. “If you want to know the truth,” Nona said late in life, “I was the chief sufferer of the Donner Party.”
    McGlashan’s polymath interests led him in many directions, including politics (he was elected a California assemblyman in 1884 and chairman of the notorious Anti-Chinese League soon after, as well as being nominated for the state’s governorship by the Labor Party) and biology (with Kelley’s mother, June, he discovered a butterfly species that became known as Melataea macglashani ). To others unfamiliar with his workaholism, McGlashan seemed attentive, polite, sharply intelligent, and sensitive. He had a hypnotic gaze, white hair, and a mustache that gave him authority, and complete ease before an audience. If California could boast of imperial families in the years before Hollywood showbizdom, Charles McGlashan headed one of them.
    His daughter June followed him into law and was one of the first women admitted to the California bar.They practiced together for several years, and courtroom observers noticed that June had inherited her father’s fire as a speaker and persuader. McGlashan taught June, a fellow introvert, that it was pointless to try to make others understand one’s own motivations. He told her to simply do what she thought was best without bothering to explain why and see if others would follow. It was a haughty approach that belied the value of differing opinions and the importance of forming connections with other people.
    Charles McGlashan had won many plaudits for his work in law, government, history, and science—he was a great man in the minds of most people around him—and he fed on public praise.When publicly challenged, such as when the committee controlling the erection of the Donner Party monument changed his wording of the stone inscription, he would quickly withdraw his support and become bitter. June shared her father’s dark and brooding qualities, which lay hidden behind the public sparkle. She bottled up her anger and tried to contain her tension.Before arguing a case in court, she often clenched her fists so tightly she drew blood. And like her father, June would hole up to restore her energy when she felt drained.
    In 1909 June married George “Doc” Kelley, a Truckee dentist who practiced law part time, and she left her father’s office. Doc was famously affable, a man of simple enthusiasms who immersed himself in the civic life of the town, and who had originally courted June’s sister. For a few years June continued working, as the county deputy district attorney, a job that sometimes pitted her against her defense attorney father in court. “The ring of steel and clash of swords brought juries and witnesses to the edge of their seats,” a McGlashan family member recalled. “They insulted each other in sophisticated, polished displays of a high intense disdain that drew on the dramatic instincts of both to the fullest.”
    In August 1912 June gave birth to a son, Douglas McGlashan Kelley. The family moved from Truckee to San Francisco in 1919, and Doc set up a dentistry office at Ninth and Irving, where he worked for more than fifty years. Young Douglas felt the intense love and protection of June,which contrasted with the easygoing companionship of Doc. To her, the boy was the embodiment of the McGlashan line; he was not an amiable nonentity, as June increasingly came to find her husband. As a student, Douglas immersed himself in brainy activities: helping build